Back to 1951

A while ago I went on a nightly ebay-spree and ended up buying several vintage sewing magazines. I originally had started out looking mostly for 1940s magazines, inspired by the amazing kick-ass tv series Agent Carter, but soon saw that there were barely any magazines around from that decade. It does not pay any compliments to my intellect that it took me a while to figure out why so few German fashion magazines from the 1940s were up on German Ebay - yup, I guess at that time German women had more pressing worries than how fashionable they were.
The magazines I bought were a Vobach magazine from 1936, where the patterns turned out to be rather underwhelming, and Beyer's Mode für Alle from 1951, with several dresses that immediately caught my eye.

For the beginning, I picked out the blue cocktail dress shown on the right side - it's supposed to be embroidered with pearls and sequins, but I'll probably leave it plain. The pattern sheet containing the pattern pieces turned out to be quite a challenge. With more than 100 different pattern pieces on each side and everything printed in black, the sheet might as well have contained the strategy plan for the Russian invasion and it took a lot of patience and good lighting to locate and trace the pattern pieces that I needed.

So, time for a mock-up. Other than modern patterns, vintage sewing magazines contained only a single size for each garment. Having to scale everything up or down is more work, but then again 

First mock-up: Definitely too large. Not exactly flattering for Ada, my mannequin.

Cut everything up, re-sewed: yup, a lot better. The skirt will have to be shortened though.

My favorite stall on the monday-morning fabric market provided me with some black-on-black polkadot fabric, for the affordable price of 8€ for 4 meters. A rainy sunday afternoon and some binge-watching of Masters of Sex (my new addiction - a tv series around the Masters-Johnsson research, set in the 50s and 60s...) gave me the best motivation to start working and I needed around 6 episodes to bring the dress to its current state:

It's still too long, but I guess I'll need an occasion to actually wear it as a motivation to do the hem. It's a full circle skirt with around 6m circumference, and as hemming isn't exactly my favorite activity, I'm putting it off until I absolutely have to do it :)
And I might need a petticoat to wear it with...

All in all material cost so far: 8€ for the fabric, and I still had the zipper.

Back on track!

Just before christmas, when I was actually supposed to start studying for my exams, I finally got my sewing mojo back.

Having left part of my fabric stash, most of my sewing patterns and my beloved mannequin back in Germany, I instead picked a download pattern for an easy dress from Burdastyle.....which is something I'm not going to do again so soon:
More than 60 pages of printout, 30 minutes of frantic cutting paper edges and glueing pattern pieces and cutting out the pattern, while some of the contained pattern pieces weren't even needed for this version of the dress, but only for a variation of it - for which the instructions were of course NOT contained in my download.

Lots of dead trees

Ironically, the dress I had picked was contained in the current Burdastyle magazine - since the Dutch version contains the same patterns as the German one, I could have spared myself a lot of crawling around on the floor with glue and scissors, by a 2-minute-trip to Albert Heijn around the corner.
Anyway, enough ranting, while the fabric wasn't the nicest jersey to work with, and the pattern itself isn't that spectacular, I'm happy. Comfortable work-proof cold-weather-dress.

Some days later I came across a really nice sewing blog, petit-main-sauvage, featuring a lot of simple but pretty patterns and tutorials for pattern drafting and alterations. Some of them immediately went onto my to-sew-list, for example this dress:

I bought the fabrics last year on the Dutch fabric market that is touring through Germany, and the blog mentioned above is actually a Dutch blog - a rather fitting project for my start here in Amsterdam :)
A new favorite in my wardrobe, I think!

Next on the sewing agenda: My dress for the Gala Nocturna! I have a plan A and plan B, let's see which one wins...
Now that all my boxes, patterns, costuming books, and my mannequin Ada are finally here, I'm a little more enthusiastic as well.